As I mentioned last time, the Ornate Spyglass is a fun little tool I always carry around for screenshots. However, there's a weird bug/glitch to it that can sometimes lead to some VERY weird shots.

Sometimes when you use the Spyglass, the camera will slowly start zooming out, back towards you. This is NOT supposed to happen, but when it does, you can actually manually zoom your camera out, and see YOURSELF with the Spyglass! Which gives you a bunch of new screenshot tricks to play around with!

When the Spyglass malfunctions and you start zooming in/out, you can actually zoom in on yourself WAY closer than normal. Everyone's tried the WoW selfie, right? We all know that when you zoom in too close, your character turns transparent and you can see through them. Like this:

Useless!!

However, with the Spyglass trick, you can zoom in right up to the pixellated follicles on your toon's face. You can get really close.

No, like I mean REALLY close.

You don't understand. I mean CAMERA UP YOUR NOSTRILS CLOSE.

Now obviously, when you're zoomed in this much, a lot of the in-game textures and item models start to really look pretty bad. But hey, you can't win 'em all.

The other cool thing about Spyglasses going haywire is that they retain the unusual field of view (thanks for the term clarification, Andy) that normal Spyglass shots have. By this I mean, the backgrounds and perspectives are totally different than in normal screenshots. Here's some samples.

The Spyglass shots aren't necessarily BETTER, but they are definitely interesting to look at!

The only really sad thing about all this is that the Spyglass messing up seems to be completely at random! 9 times out of 10 it'll work completely fine, so it's really hard to "set up" these shots. It's too bad, because I'd DEFINITELY play around with this more if I could at least control when it was going to happen! Ah well.

Weird, the zoom-out thing happens to me all the time; I just assumed that's how it worked. Didn't occur to me to try the super-telephoto self-portrait though :D

One interesting thing about this super-tele look is that it'd be almost impossible to do with a real camera, as the long focal length means small depth of focus, so you wouldn't be able to get both the foreground and background sharp. Perhaps that's why it looks so strange – it's not something we normally see; instead, almost all super-tele photographs have the background as an almost abstract blur.